Silent Spring

As Carson begins to introduce the central argument of her text, she juxtaposes the “history of life on earth” with the sudden introduction of widespread changes in the 1900s, as people “acquired significant power to alter the nature of this world” (5). It took “hundreds of millions of years” (6) to create the life on earth people are accustomed to, yet the contamination caused by man is quickly altering the landscape in irreversible ways.

The primary cause of the environmental destruction facing people, Carson argues, is caused by attempts to “control a few unwanted species” (8). These attempts quickly erode the “built-in checks and balances” (10) of nature and will cause (or have already caused) enormous harm. Carson emphasizes that the sense of urgency with which people attempt to control the environment is a key part of the issue, since nature itself moves much more slowly and patiently. A “lack of prudent concern for the integrity of the natural world” (13) will destroy the world around people if they do not adjust our ways of thinking and our actions.

When science became able to produce chemicals that could kill or repel insects, a new field was created. As a result, “for the first time in the history of the world, every human being is now subjected to contact with dangerous chemicals” (15). These chemicals are present in the home, in the workplace, and in nature. After World War II, scientists because able to synthesize previously separate chemicals together, creating poisonous mixtures that have “enormous biological potency” (16). There was more than a “fivefold increase” (17) in the production of synthetic pesticides in the United States in the decade during which Carson developed her text.

Carson explains in detail the chemical construction of these synthesized poisons, almost all of which fall into two categories. The first category, the “chlorinated hydrocarbons,” are represented most popularly by the chemical “DDT” (18). Chlorinated hydrocarbons are made up of combinations of carbon and other molecules. Although carbon is the “indispensable building bloc[k] of the living world” (19), it can become deadly when it is rearranged, for example, to include a specific number of methane or chlorine molecules. Although DDT is one of the chlorinated hydrocarbons “so universally used that in most minds the product takes on the harmless aspect of the familiar” (20), it is, in fact, so dangerous that “a minute quantity can bring about vast changes in the body” (21).

The second category of popular insecticides are the “alkyl or organic phosphates […] among the most poisonous chemicals in the world” (27). These chemical compounds were discovered by a German scientist in the 1930s and were quickly utilized as “new and devastating weapons” (28). While some of the organic phosphates became “deadly nerve gases” (28), others became common insecticides.

Chlorinated hydrocarbons act on the body in different ways than the alkyl/organic phosphates. The first, like DDT, work by being stored in fat deposits internally, often causing long-term, slow-moving effects. The organic phosphates, instead, “have the ability to destroy enzymes” (28) in the body, causing “tremors, muscle spasms, convulsions, and death” (29).

Carson also describes chemicals used as herbicides in an attempt to control unwanted plants. Some of these “rank as among the most dangerous materials” (36) in use in the United States. She cautions, as she concludes the section, that people should not be “indifferent to the […] effect in chemicals that we disseminate widely in our environment” (37).